Foundations of the Anglican Church LXXX

Archbishop of Canterbury

Matthew Parker

Elizabeth came to the throne November  17^th 1558.  Her sister, Mary I, had died that morning only to be followed later in the day by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Reginald Pole.  Mary was buried with full Catholic Rites at Westminster Abbey on December 14.  At Christmas the new Queen instructed the Bishop of Carlisle—who was celebrating Christmas Mass in the Chapel Royal at Saint James—to eliminate the elevation of the Host and Chalice at the consecration.  This was the first public sign that Elizabeth was planning to discontinue the Catholic restoration begun by Mary.  The Bishop, Owen Oglethorpe, refused her order and elevated the Sacrament, and the Queen stormed out.  The following month Elizabeth was crowned with the traditional Catholic ceremonial except that she once again instructed Bishop Oglethorpe—the only one of the English Bishops who would agree to officiate at the Coronation—not to elevate the Host and Chalice.  Once again he did.  Once again she stormed out.  In April Parliament restored the Protestant Rites—with slight revisions to the 1552 Prayer book—and passed an act of Uniformity.  The Bishops of England and Wales, with only the exception of Anthony Kitchin of Llandaff, refused to return to the Protestant liturgy and were deposed of their sees.  Eamon Duffy, the most distinguished living historian of the English Reformation, said of Kitchen that he was a “timeserver who would doubtless have become a Hindu if required, provided he was allowed to hold on to the See of Llandaff.”  It is important to read Kitchin correctly, however; he may have been without much spine; but he was a man of principle.  He opposed the election of Mathew Parker as Archbishop of Canterbury and refused to participate in his consecration precisely because of Parker’s convinced Protestantism. 

Matthew Parker seems to have been a “shirt-tail relative” of Thomas Cranmer. Like Cranmer he was a Cambridge man.  And like Cranmer he was given in his Cambridge years (the 1520’s) to the new religious ideas coming out of Germany. He was ordained priest according to Catholic rites in 1527 and appointed a chaplain to Anne Boleyn.  Before her execution, Anne asked him to take particular care of the infant Elizabeth.  Despite his ties to Anne, Parker remained in the royal favor; in 1537 he was appointed a chaplain to Henry VIII and rewarded with a series of ecclesiastical benefices that guaranteed him a comfortable living.  In the ecclesiastical politics of the court, his ties to Cranmer and friendship with Hugh Latimer put him strongly in the Reformed court and at enmity with Stephen Gardiner and others of the Orthodox faction.  Upon the accession of Edward VI but even before clerical marriage was legalized by Parliament and Convocation (the assembly of Bishops), Parker married Margaret Harlestone from a comfortable Norfolk family. 

In many ways Parker typified the new Anglican clergy.  He was educated, sophisticated, even somewhat worldly.  He led a comfortable domestic life with wife and children—and servants to care for them.  He was a scholar and an intellectual; there was nothing of the pious priest about him.  This new-style divine was a consecrated layman, intellectual and refined, more at home in the company of gentlemen than of pious souls. 

Under Mary, of course, Parker lost it all.  Being married—and principled enough not to have his wife “put away” as did many Marian returnees to the Catholic faith, Parker lost all his benefices and was severely reduced financially.  Nevertheless the situation was never so bad that unlike many of co-religionists he felt no need to flee England and was able to live peacefully—if obscurely—through Mary’s reign. 

The accession of Elizabeth favored him politically but it did take away his tranquility.

When the Bishops of England and Wales—excepting, of course, Andrew Kitchin—refused the Act of Uniformity restoring the Protestant liturgy and were deposed for so doing, Elizabeth was given the opportunity to build a new Church to her liking.  Fourteen sees—all but Kitchin’s Llandaff—were declared vacant.  Elizabeth could pick the entire bench of bishops to her liking.  But first the See of Canterbury had to be filled as it was the Primate’s prerogative to consecrate the new bishops. Elizabeth was determined to have Parker—her mother’s favorite chaplain—as the new Archbishop.  Parker wanted no part of it.  And why should he?  He foresaw the difficulties—more clearly than Elizabeth—in restoring Protestantism.  As a moderate  himself he could see the two wings—the Catholic and the Puritan—that would be fighting for control of the future of the Church in England and he did not want to be in the middle.  Moreover, while the Queen was very attached to him she was not pleased that he was married.  Elizabeth, never herself to marry, was not in favor of married clergy and she showed it by taking out her displeasure on clergy wives and Margaret Parker in particular.  After a royal visit to the Parker’s at Lambeth, the London residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Queen said to Lady Parker: “How should I address you: for Madam I may not call you; mistress I should be ashamed to call you.”  What a bitch!

Foundations of the Anglican Church LXXVIX

Coronation Portrait of
Elizabeth I

One of the first challenges Elizabeth had to meet was what to do with the Church.  She could not keep it in the Catholic communion—as far as the Pope was concerned she was illegitimate and therefore had no legal right to the throne.  Moreover, while far less religious than either her brother Edward (Protestant) or her sister Mary (Catholic), Elizabeth was by far the best educated theologically of the three.  She was also the most open minded and inclined to tolerance.  Elizabeth was both natively intelligent (which her sister and  brother were not) and had the open and critical mind of the serious student.  Her education had been overseen by Archbishop Cranmer and he made sure to indoctrinate her in Protestant thought, but she was no narrow evangelical like her brother. 

Elizabeth proceeded with caution.  She made guarantees that she did not want to trouble the consciences of any of her subjects.  Mary was buried in Westminster Abbey with full Catholic rites on December 14.  Just eleven days later, however, she instructed  Owen Oglethorpe. the Bishop of Carlisle who was offering Christmas Mass in the Chapel Royal at Saint James Palace that he was not to elevate the Host or Chalice at the consecration.  She had yet demanded no other changes in the Latin Mass, but the Elevation of the Host and Chalice, which emphasizes Transubstantiation, was more than the Protestant Elizabeth would suffer even in the short run.  Elizabeth stormed out of the chapel.  Nevertheless, as Oglethorpe was the only bishop who would agree to officiate at her coronation on January 15^th following the Queen gave him a second chance.  Again the Queen instructed him not to elevate the Host and Chalice; again he did; again the Queen stormed out—of her own coronation Mass.  Little by little that year of 1559 Elizabeth moved to re-introduce Protestantism.  Oglethorpe and the other Marian bishops were deprived of their sees for their unwillingness to support the Queen’s religious policies.  The monks were evicted from Westminster Abbey and other religious establishments were closed down, becoming “collegiate” churches with a college of canons and a dean.  In April Parliament passed a new Act of Uniformity which abolished the Mass and replaced the Catholic Liturgy with a new Book of Common Prayer. The 1559 Prayer Book was a slightly—but significantly—revised version of Cranmer’s 1552  book.  Clergy who would not implement the rite were removed from their benefices.  Fourteen Bishops in England and Wales were deprived of their sees.  Most were arrested for a period of time but then allowed to retire to house arrest in private life where they privately practiced the Catholic faith without interference.  An exception was Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London who refused the oath of supremacy and was confined to the Marshalsea Prison until this death ten years later.  The Extreme Protestant Party clamored for the execution of Bonner and the other bishops, but Elizabeth was not inclined to make martyrs.  Nicholas Heath, deposed Archbishop of York, also refused both the Act of Uniformity and the Act of Supremacy but assured Elizabeth of his loyalty in matters secular.  He was allowed to retire to his estates in Surrey where Elizabeth visited him several times.  Cuthbert Tunstall, deposed bishop of Durham, was put under the custody of the New Archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker, at Lambeth Palace.  He died there eleven weeks later.

Just about six weeks after Elizabeth’s accession to the throne, Giovanni Angelo Medici was elected Pope as Pius IV.  The papacy had been vacant from the death of Paul IV four months earlier.  Pius did not want to aggravate the plight of English Catholics and so he was silent in the face of Elizabeth’s return of the Church of England to Protestant doctrine and liturgy.  Pius also was not unlike the present Pope as he eschewed much of the pomp and splendor that had traditionally gone with the Papal Court.  He was characterized by Giorgio Vasari for his “stinginess of living, dullness of dress, and simplicity in so many things.”  In the sixteenth century Pope were not admired for toning down the Renaissance excess.  He also made some serious concessions to preserve the unity of the Church in the face of the Reformation.  He permitted the restoration of the chalice to the faithful in Austria and Bohemia where there had long been agitation for this reform.  There are those historians who admire Pius for his policies; and there are those who do not.  His English strategy worked in so far as there were no Catholic executed in England for their faith until after Pius’s successor, Saint Pius V, excommunicated Elizabeth and declared her subjects both free from her authority and duty-bound to overthrow her reign.  But that is for another time. 

Foundations of the Anglican Church LXXIV

Martyrs Memorial, 

marking the site in 

Oxford where Thomas

Cranmer had been put

to death

I had mentioned in the previous post that Mary was savoring her revenge on Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer.  Cranmer had not only supported Henry in his divorce from Mary’s mother, Katherine of Aragon, but he had, as Archbishop of Canterbury and Primate of England, annulled the marriage which brought disgrace on both Katherine and Mary.  Mary was no longer Princess of Wales, nor even princess, but no more than a bastard daughter of the King, the Lady Mary.  For twenty years she was without rightful title, honors, or prospects for a royal marriage.  For twenty years she was harassed because of her loyalty to her mother and to her Catholic faith.  And while Henry was responsible, it was at Cranmer’s doing.  She not only would have her revenge, she would make him pay, toying with him as a cat might toy with a rabbit before killing it.

Mary came to the throne on July 19, 1553—twenty years and two months after Cranmer had annulled her parents’ marriage and changed the course of her life.  On September 14, of that year Cranmer was ordered to appear in Star Chamber where he was accused of treason for having supported Lady Jane Grey as Queen against Mary’s claims. He was remanded to the Tower of London as a prisoner.  When Mary came to the throne, Cranmer had advised other Protestant leaders to flee England but he himself determined to stay and fight for his reformation.  Cranmer was tried at the London Guildhall for treason—along with Lady Jane Grey, her husband, Lord Guildford Dudley and two of Dudley’s brothers.  He—and they—were found guilty and sentenced to death.  But Mary had other plans for her one-time nemesis than a traitor’s beheading.   In March 1554 Cranmer, along with Protestant bishops Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, both of whom refused to conform to the old religion, were confined in the Bocardo Prison in Oxford where they were to be tried for heresy.  The punishment for heresy was far more dreadful than treason: being burned alive rather than being beheaded.  Cranmer and the others were allowed to sit and ponder their destiny in the Bocardo for seventeen months before being brought to trial.  All this time, Cranmer was still Archbishop of Canterbury—Mary not having deprived him of his See, though having entrusted the primate’s normal duties (such as her coronation) to Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester and her Lord Chancellor.  The trials of the three accused heretics began in September 1555 and all three were found guilty.  Ridley and Latimer were executed almost immediately after their trials—on October 16^th 1555.  Cranmer was brought to the site of the judicial murders and forced to watch as his two faithful collaborators were burned alive at the stake for their Protestant faith.  It was only the following month, November 1555, that he was officially deprived of his See. But Mary did not act quickly.  Indeed she toyed with him—he was moved from the Bocardo to the home of the Dean of Christchurch, the Oxford Cathedral and College.  Here he was treated not as prisoner but as a guest.  A variety of Catholic academics visited him and debated with him over issues of papal authority, Eucharistic doctrines, and purgatory.  Cranmer submitted to the authority of the Queen and accepted Catholic doctrine.  He attended Mass and asked for sacramental absolution.  But then on February 14, 1556 he was defrocked from the clergy and sent back to prison.  Being defrocked left him vulnerable to capital punishment and ten days later a royal writ for his execution on March 7^th was sent to the Mayor of Oxford.  Cranmer issued a recantation of his Protestant faith, accepting papal supremacy, purgatory, transubstantiation, Eucharistic Sacrifice and the doctrine that outside the Catholic Church there is no salvation.  He fully repudiated any Lutheran or Zwinglian doctrine.  The writ for his execution was put in abeyance.  By Canon Law, having recanted his heresy, he was to be spared.  But that would not satisfy Mary’s jealousy to make him suffer.  He was to die and it was to be by burning.   He was told to prepare a final statement affirming his Catholic faith that he was to proclaim from the pyre before it was set alight.  He did so.  But on March 21^st when he was taken to the same site where Ridley and Latimer had been burned five months earlier, he departed from the prepared text, repented of his recantation of Protestantism, and cast his right hand into the fire first—his penance for having signed the recantation with that hand.  As the flames rose around him he called “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit…I see the heavens open and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.”  This second phrase is taken from the martyrdom of Stephen in Acts 7.

It is unfair to try to sum up a life as complex as Thomas Cranmer but there are certain themes that emerge.  He was an ambitious man and while one aspect that that ambition was to advance the faith in which he believed, religious zealotry does not explain it all.   There was a certain duplicity in him.  He concealed both his having a wife and his Protestant leanings from King Henry knowing that his ideas would lead him, under Henry, at least to removal from office and possibly to the stake for his understanding of the Eucharist, of Masses for the Dead, of purgatory, and of the intercession of the saints.  Indeed, despite his personal beliefs, he had supported the Six Articles in 1539—articles that articulated a very Catholic understanding of the Sacrifice of the Mass as well as confession, clerical celibacy, and other Catholic perspectives.  Moreover, in addition to the duplicity there was certain instability to Cranmer’s faith.  He was no original thinker or even a critical thinker; he began with Luther’s theological position but over the years moved towards a more radical Swiss Protestantism without ever really understanding either position in depth.  Faith to Cranmer was more a matter of intellectual stimulation, or even titillation, than inner experience.   When Edward came to the throne, he could express his Protestant views and indeed create a magnificent liturgy that celebrated that theology, but he also was disloyal to Henry’s wishes regarding the regency and broke his oath to the old King regarding as to how the Kingdom was to be administered and how the succession to the Throne was to be arranged during the minority of the new King.    When Mary came to the throne he did not flee even though he advised others to do so, but his recantation of all he had worked for and done for twenty-three years in a desperate hope to save his life, shows a certain lack of spine.  Only when he realized that he was damned either way did he stand up for his Protestant principles.  I don’t think he was insincere, but I think for Cranmer faith was more a matter of intellectual assent than personal commitment.  He has been made a hero, the closest thing they can manage for a saint, by the evangelical wing of the Church of England but in fact I think there was less to Cranmer than meets the eye.  He was too vacillating to be a hero; a martyr yes, but a most reluctant one.  It cannot be denied however that he was a master of the English language, second only to Shakespeare in the ability to create elegant and pithy phrases that draw from the depths of the human heart and can make the soul soar.  All in all, while he was most talented he was no better a man than many—most—of the bishops of his day, Protestant or Catholic, a climber, a theoretician, a man of ideas more than deeds, a disappointment.  He was not a bad man but he lacked a certain compass that a man of faith would have.  When you think about it, a self-indulgent narcissist wearing the crown and a sycophantic dilatant wearing the miter was no way to begin a Church.  But then they didn’t begin the Church of England—it was an ancient Church going back into mists of early Romano-Britain—and its rich heritage would sustain it even through the troubled times of Henry and Edward and Mary.  And to be fair, Thomas Cranmer contributed to that rich heritage by the magnificent Prayer Book that he created to replace the beautiful but archaic rites that had preceded it.  All in all then I think we have a man whose moral compass kept pointing towards power rather than towards true north and who was more articulate than intellectual, a man of his time rather than a man for the ages, but no worse than many of his contemporaries and better than most.  

Foundations of the Anglican Church LXXIX

Bonner's Cathedral of Saint Paul's

London--this cathedral was 

destroyed in the Great Fire of 

London in 1666 and replaced by 

Christopher Wren's masterpiece.

Another bishop on whom Mary depended in her program to restore England to the Catholic faith was Edmund Bonner.  Bonner had pretty humble beginnings.  His father was a woodsman or a lumberman in Worcestershire.  He studied law—not at the Inns of Court, which was common for a person who intended to follow a career in law, but at Oxford, earning degrees in both the Civil and Canon Law.  He was ordained quite young—perhaps as young as 22.  He was in the employ of Cardinal Wolsey and loyally stayed with him when he was arrested and accompanied the Cardinal on his trip to London to face the wrath of Henry (a wrath fanned into fury by Anne Boleyn who resented Wolsey’s attempts to break her ambitious relationship with the King.) It was a dangerous thing to do—to stay with the Cardinal in his time of disfavor.  Wolsey was fortunate enough not to make London but to die on the way—at Leicester Abbey, an Augustinian foundation just about halfway from Wolsey’s See at York to London where Henry—and the Tower—awaited him.  Bonner was with the Cardinal when he died. 

Cromwell scavenged the remnants of Wolsey’s service for what talent could go for the King’s work and Bonner found himself in the royal employ.   He was sent to Rome in 1532 to try to forestall action against Henry in the Roman Curia and in a 1533 meeting with Clement VII at Marseilles (where the Pope was conferring with Henry’s current foe, Francis I of France) Bonner threated the Pope with appealing over the Pope to a General Council for an annulment for Henry.  Clement was furious and Henry never got around to the appeal, choosing schism instead.  Bonner served Henry on embassies both to Charles V and to the French court and he made contact with the German Lutherans with whom he showed some doctrinal sympathy.  As an ambassador, Bonner could be quite abrasive and his tendency to get in altercations with his hosts did not help him achieve his diplomatic goals.  Yet this didn’t displease Henry who had a particular antipathy for the French.  Bonner also went out of his way to alienate Stephen Gardiner who had preceded him as ambassador in Paris and about whom he, Bonner, filed a highly critical report. 

Bonner oversaw the printing of “The King’s Great Bible” at Paris while ambassador to the French Court.  Myles Coverdale, later Bishop of Exeter and strong proponent of Protestant doctrine and worship in the reign of Edward VI, had provided this English translation under the sponsorship of Henry for use in the services of the Church of England.  (Henry had retained the Latin Mass throughout his reign, but much like the first introduction of the vernacular in the Catholic Church at the time of the Second Vatican Council, the custom of reading the Epistle and Gospel in English—after they had been read in Latin—was to pave the way for greater changes yet to come.)  Henry (and his Protestant-leaning minion, Thomas Cromwell) were quite impressed at Bonner’s performance with getting the Bible printed and rewarded him with the Bishopric of Hereford.  As he was still in France, however, he could neither be consecrated or take possession of his see and Henry moved him to London in 1540 where he was consecrated according to the old rites which would remain unaltered in the time of King Henry. 

Bonner had been trained in law, not theology, and he had never shown much interested in the finer points of doctrine. Indeed, if anything he seemed to lean towards a version of Lutheranism.  Yet once in his diocese he became an implacable religious conservative.  When the wind blew in a more traditionalist direction after the execution of Thomas Cromwell, and Parliament passed the Six Articles, Bonner began an earnest persecution of all those in his diocese who did not adhere strictly to Catholic Doctrine on Transubstantiation, on purgatory, and on the cult of the saints. 

The death of Henry and the accession of King Edward changed everything.  Within a few months of the new King’s accession a set of injunctions had been drawn up for reform in the Church and the bishops were entrusted with the task of seeing that they were carried out in their cathedrals as well as in the parishes of their diocese.  The injunctions required

1.    all images were to be taken down

2.    stained glass, statutes, and shrines were to be dismantled

3.    rood screens, their lofts, and the rood beam with its cross and figures of John the Apostle and the Virgin Mary were to be destroyed

4.    vestments were abolished and were to be burned or sold

5.    sacred vessels were to be melted down and replaced by pewter or silver cups and tankards

6.    processions were banned

7.    the use of ashes on Ash Wednesday, Palms on Palm Sunday, and candles on Candlemas was done away with

8.    chantries (mortuary chapels) with endowed masses for those buried there were abolished

9.    masses for the dead were abolished.   

The bishops were responsible to see that these directives were carried out in their respective dioceses, but the Council appointed visitators to go around the kingdom to make sure the changes had been carried out.  Bonner refused to implement the changes and resisted the idea of visitors coming to his diocese.  As London was the national capital, the Council could not afford dissent there. He was arrested and imprisoned in the notorious Fleet Prison.  There he changed his strategy and gave in to the visitation so as to be released and take his seat in Parliament where he could fight the new laws.  His resistance to the Prayer Book of 1549, however,  led to his being deprived of his see and imprisoned for the remained of King Edward’s reign.

Mary, on her accession, freed him and restored him to this See.  Bonner vigorously sought to restore Catholic doctrine and practice but had a rough time of it.  During his imprisonment, Edward’s Bishop of London, Nicholas Ridley, had pretty thoroughly destroyed what elements of Catholicism were left.  Not only had the stone altars been smashed in the London churches, the crosses and crucifixes torn down, the images of the saints ripped from their niches, but more important, Londoners had been well catechized in the Reformed Religion. 

Protestantism appealed to the merchant class and London was a merchant citu.  Protestantism was a religion that showed an appreciation for critical thinking and intellectual pursuits.  It was not a matter of blind authority and ancient traditions that no longer made sense.  Protestantism was rational, a thinking man’s religion.  There was no room for superstition.  Moreover it was economically rational. One didn’t put good money into silk vestments or silver crosses or gold chalices.  One gave to the poor.  One endowed schools.  And one re-invested one’s money for greater profit.  This was a religion for Londoners.  And when Bonner came back to his diocese after an absence of six years, the damage had been done.  Bonner did what he could do to repair the churches for Catholic worship again but he never won the confidence of the Londoners.  Even worse, he undertook a fierce persecution of Protestants, searching them out, trying them in ecclesiastical courts, and subjecting them to torture and being burned at the stake.  He was responsible for some of the worst excesses of “Bloody Mary’s” reign. 

Unlike Gardiner who predeceased Mary, Bonner lived well into Elizabeth’s reign.  He refused to swear to her supremacy over the Church.  Although he sat in her first Parliament where he spoke against her policy of reintroducing Protestantism, he was deprived of his See and imprisoned by the end of her first year on the throne.  Although many called for his death in retaliation for those martyred under his authority for their Protestant faith, he was never executed.  He remained imprisoned under somewhat genteel terms and every four months was given a new opportunity—which he always refused—to swear to the royal supremacy.  He died eleven years into Elizabeth reign. 

I notice that I have quite often used the term “Protestant” here and I need to clarify that term as I am not using it in the somewhat generic sense that we use to cover everything from a Swedish Lutheran to a Pennsylvania Dutch Mennonite.  The problem is that the other-than-Catholic movement in the Church of England was not stable through this period.  Phase I which might be thought to be 1520-1540 leaned towards Lutheran thought.  Phase II, which we shall mark as 1540 to the accession of Elizabeth in 1558 leaned more to the Swiss model but I wouldn’t say “Calvinist.”  It was sort of a generic Swiss/Strasbourg variety influenced heavily by Martin Bucer, the Strasbourg reformer who had taken refuge in England between 1549 and 1551, but also drawing on Bucer’s friends among the Swiss, especially Zwingli.  Phase III which will be the reign of Elizabeth will see a real struggle between the Puritan party who are definitely Calvinist and the more moderate party which would have favored the more middle of the road sort of theology typified in the reign of Edward VI.  The Puritan party was to win out, though Elizabeth herself was definitely a theological moderate.  But all that is still away off in our entries. 

Foundations of the Anglican Church LXXVIII

Stephen Gardiner

Let’s go back to the history of the Church of England for an entry or two. This weekend with the Holy Father’s trip to Jordan, Palestine, and Israel will give some contemporary events to comment on, but before we get into that hoopla, I would like to advance by a notch or two the history of the Church of England as there is still so much to cover.  We are only up to about 1554 and most of the best stuff is yet to come.

Where we left off was Queen Mary’s process of brining the Church of England back into the Roman Communion.  It was not as quick a process as one might think.  Mary had deposed about a half-dozen or more convinced Protestant bishops but to replace them had no choice but to rely on any number of bishops who had supported her father’s schism and even some who had introduced the Protestant reforms of Archbishop Cranmer during the reign of her brother, King Edward VI. Robert Parfew, Bishop of St Asaph, had even been one of the contributors to Cranmer’s 1549 Prayerbook.  With only two or three exceptions of clergy who had remained on the continent during the reigns of her father and brother, there simply were no bishops and few priests who had not acceded to schism, if not having gone further in embracing the new doctrines and liturgies of Cranmer. 

One of the Churchmen who had gone along with the schism of King Henry, indeed provided the canonical justifications for it, but rebelled at the liturgical and doctrinal innovations of King Edward’s reign, was Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester.

Gardiner was a brilliant jurist—holding the doctorates in both canon and civil law from Cambridge.  He also was a classicist, an avid scholar of both Latin and Greek.  He was one of the humanists in the early phases of what might be called the Renaissance England, following the example of Dean Colet and Thomas More.  (I know I am a snob, but I am reluctant to speak of an “English Renaissance, and if it weren’t for Shakespeare I would refuse completely.  The English have always struck me as far to practical to pay serious attention to anything beyond commerce and the military.)  Originally in the service of Cardinal Wolsey, Henry’s all-competent Lord Chancellor, Gardiner was noticed by the King and transferred to his service before Wolsey’s fall.  Gardiner served Henry in a variety of diplomatic missions on the continent, several of which had to do with advancing Henry’s plans to divorce Queen Katherine.  In 1527 Gardiner was sent to Rome to plead Henry’s cause to Clement VII—a futile effort despite Gardiner’s superior knowledge of canon law because of Clement’s dependency on the Emperor Charles V, Katherine’s nephew.  (Medici politics doomed this mission from the start.  You can see more about this in the entry for September 7, 2013.)  While Gardiner failed in his mission to secure the annulment, Henry was grateful for his efforts—and anxious to use  his talents in the upcoming battle he (Henry) had determined to wage with the Church—named Gardiner his secretary.  In 1531 Henry arranged for Gardiner to be named Bishop of Winchester—England’s wealthiest see.  This should not be construed to mean that Gardiner was the King’s toady.  In giving Gardiner the See of Winchester, Henry acknowledged that Gardiner had often opposed Henry’s policies and indeed he would do so again in the following year when Henry tried to intimidate the bishops as the break with Rome came closer.  Nevertheless, as the leading canon lawyer in the realm—and indeed one of the finest in Europe—Henry depended on Gardiner both to argue the case for his annulment and to justify the break with Rome.  Gardiner delivered on both counts. 

Henry was no slouch theologically and although a firm Catholic doctrinally and liturgically—though not a papal Catholic after 1530 or so—was willing to make some accommodation to the crypto-Protestants in the English Church and politics.  This was the Cranmer-Cromwell faction. In 1538 Cranmer had brought three Lutheran theologians to London to discuss a variety of doctrines and practices—transubstantiation, celibacy of the clergy, the importance of confession, the sacrificial nature of the Mass.  As Henry was at the time in negotiation for marriage with a Protestant Princess—Anne of Cleves—he turned a blind eye to the introduction of this Trojan Horse of Continental Protestantism into his realm, but a number of conservative bishops, including Gardiner, saw it as a threat to orthodoxy.  The rest of Henry’s reign would be marked by infighting among the bishops as Gardiner, Tunstall of Durham, Bonner of London and other conservatives tried to out maneuver Cranmer, Latimer and Shaxton who represented a Protestant party among the bishops.  While Latimer and Shaxton did fall into Henry’s disfavor, Cranmer was able to outwit his foes and in fact turn the tables on them.  When Henry died, Cranmer was able to keep Gardiner from the Council of Regency and as the new reign changed the course of the Church of England, to advance the Protestant agenda. Gardiner, who resisted, was deprived of his see and imprisoned.  He remained imprisoned throughout Edward reign.  Mary, upon her accession, freed him, restored him to his see at Winchester, and named him her Lord Chancellor, a position equivalent to Prime Minister today.  Tables were now turned as the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cranmer, was imprisoned for treason and on trial for heresy.  In Cranmer’s enforced absence, Gardiner performed the coronation rites for Mary at Westminster Abbey on November 1, 1553.

Mary and her Chancellor did not always agree.  Their most notable disagreement was over Mary’s plan to marry her cousin, Philip of Spain, in hopes of bearing a child who could succeed to the throne and avoid Mary’s Protestant sister, Elizabeth, becoming Queen.  Gardiner saw the unpopularity of a foreign husband, particularly a Spaniard, and joined a petition of Parliament that Mary should choose an English husband, but Mary would not be dissuaded.  As Chancellor Gardiner had to conduct much of the negotiations for this ill-advised marriage and he carried out his duties and presided at their marriage in his cathedral at Winchester on July 25, 1554.  The marriage failed to produce the desire heir.  While Mary genuinely loved her husband, Philip saw the marriage strictly in political terms and Philip remained in England just over a year.  Mary should have listened to Gardiner.

While she intended on restoring England to the Catholic Communion, Mary initially promised religious tolerance to her Protestant subjects. In regard to Cranmer she was determined to avenge her mother, but otherwise did not seem over anxious to persecute Protestants.  Gardiner encouraged her in this policy of toleration, but as time went on the Queen grew more worried about what would happen should her Protestant sister gain the throne, and became more aggressive in her religious policies. Gardiner tried to warn her off this.  He himself showed great tolerance towards Protestants in his diocese.  But in 1554 Mary had Parliament pass the Heresy Acts as part of the conditions under which the Church of England would be readmitted to the Catholic Communion.   Despite Gardiner’s advice Mary became more and more harsh on her Protestant subjects, executing almost 300 people and earning the sobriquet: Bloody Mary.

Stephen Gardiner died in November 1555 and is buried in a mortuary chapel in his cathedral.